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Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum Review

Testing:

Testing of this fourth version of NVIDIAs latest assault on ATI's product stack (the Palit Sonic Platinum GTS 450 of course!) will consist of running the cards through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of equal and greater capabilities to show where it falls on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where PhysX will be disabled in the NVIDIA control panel. I will test the card at stock speeds, then overclocked in order to see how much additional performance is available and to determine if it can run with the current fastest single GPU cards on the market. The drivers used in this test will be the 10.7 Catalyst drivers for ATI and 258.96 Forceware drivers from NVIDIA for the GTX 480, 470, 465 and GTX 460. The GTS 450 and prior generation GTS 250 will be tested with the latest 260 series driver being introduced with this product lineup. Tests will be conducted at both stock and overclocked settings to gauge performance when an increase in clock speed is applied.

Overclocking:

Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum Edition 1006/2012/2190Mhz

The Palit Sonic GTS 450 is a factory overclocked piece that is the highest clocked GTS 450 tested to-date here at Overclockersclub. It comes with clock speeds of 930Mhz on the CUDA cores and 1000Mhz on the 1GB of frame buffer memory. By using MSI's Afterburner software utility version 2.0 Beta 4 I was able to increase the clock speeds up to 1006Mhz on the fixed function units and shader domain while bumping the memory speeds up to 2190Mhz. To do this did require a bump in the voltage used by the GTS 450 from the "as delivered" 1050mv to 1125mv. These results are the highest of the four GTS 450s tested but of course your mileage may vary. NVIDIA's claim that GF 106 based "Sniper" cards can be overclocked has been proven to be a fact, not just an idle boast. When I tested the reference cards, the clock speed increases were on the order of 20+%. This card goes even further allowing for additional performance above that delivered by the reference card.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

MSI's Kombuster utility was used to test stability and to put a constant load on the GPU for the purposes of testing maximum power draw and temperatures. The stability test was used to find a range of settings that are stable through a 15 minute run at 1920 x 1200 8xAA. The reported clock speeds are those that proved stable over a 15 minute test at 1920 x 1200, 8x AA and the run through the benchmarks suite.

Gaming Tests:

Far Cry 2

Metro 2033

Crysis Warhead

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2

Just Cause 2

Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Resident Evil 5

3DMark 06 Professional

3DMark Vantage

Usage:

Temperature

Power Consumption

The maximum clock speed graphs above show the overclocking potential of the GTS 450 cards. The Palit Sonic Platinum the highest of the GTS 450 group of cards. This large bump in clock speed should help the performance delivered in game. Something that should show in the following benchmarks.